Fresh Air Fiend (50 page)

My camp was near a sanctuary for red-tailed tropicbirds, on the water. I had to tie down my tent with guy lines, and in paddling I always seemed to be fighting the wind, even in the recesses of inner ponds. It was impossible to peregrinate the lagoon and not feel haunted by past nuclear events. One of the bombs had been detonated by mistake at a lower level than planned, and it flattened the whole southeast end of the island. The damage is still obvious.

Being old-timers, Ambo and Tonga were among the few people on the island who lived on their own land, in the village of Tabakea, on the narrow edge of the northern part of the island between the lagoon and the sea. Most of the rest of the island is owned by the Kiribati government and run as a coconut plantation, though a heavily subsidized one, because the copra price is so low. Apart from picking coconuts and fishing, there is little else on the island to keep the inhabitants busy. Farming is limited to a handful of breadfruit trees and some bananas, but there is no soil to speak of, and even the greenest thumb would not produce much in the crushed coral.

"Anyway, they are not cultivators," the local priest, Father Gratien Bermond, told me.

A native of an Alpine village in Haute-Savoie, he had lived in Kiribati for thirty-seven years. Father Bermond was fluent in the language and knowledgeable about the myths and customs. He encouraged traditional dancing, drumming, and singing in his church meeting hall.

"They are people of the sea," he said.

It's true. They are good fishermen and canoe builders, and as for downtime, many engage in traditional Kiribati dancing and singing, while others like nothing better than firing up the VCR, cracking open a beer, ripping the lid off a can of Ox and Palm Prime Luncheon Beef, and watching American videos until they are too drunk to see straight. Drunkenness is a serious problem—everyone says so. Littering seems habitual. Where there are no people, there are masses of birds and wind-scoured beauty and wind-driven waves lashing the emptiest beaches imaginable. But the settlements, villages, and picnic spots are sensationally littered with beer cans and the Spam and corned beefcans that pose a particular hazard to the unshod foot. To be fair, this blight is small compared to the reckless detonation of the British and American nuclear devices; and as for trash piles, few junk heaps can compare with the vehicle graveyards that the military left behind. There are whole five-acre motor pools decaying in the coconut groves. In the remotest recesses of the atoll are collapsed oil drums and rusty paraphernalia dating from the tests, mercifully decomposing into dust.

Some of the islanders are expert fishing guides, eagerly showing up at the airport for the weekly flight from Honolulu to scope out clients. In the last fifteen years, Christmas Island has been justifiably regarded as possessing the greatest opportunities for bonefishing anywhere. Much has been written in praise of the quality of the fishing in the lagoon flats—not only bonefish, but milkfish, goatfish, and trevally. World records are set on Christmas Island, and there is hardly a wall at the Captain Cook Hotel, one of the island's two hotels, that does not exhibit a photograph of a foreigner, pop-eyed under the weight of a potbellied, scaly, slack-jawed trophy—the mirror image of its captor. No, I am not a fisherman.

 

I had gone to Christmas Island to find some solitude, go bird watching, and paddle my kayak. The wildlife warden in London sold me a $5 permit to enter a Closed Area, where visits are regulated because of the many nesting birds. He said I could camp there for a night. I was intentionally vague about the number of days I would be out, and he was much more worried about bird poachers. He was a scowling man named Utimawa, who, like so many others on the island, had come to Christmas in the 1980s from distant Tarawa. Compared to overcrowded, unsanitary, drought-stricken Tarawa—with one of the highest population densities in the world—this was heaven. Here, you just reached out and there was food. The trouble was, the reaching out was regarded as poaching.

Bird catching was easy, because the birds were so numerous and so innocent. (Utimawa: "You will not need binoculars.") It was a serious problem, Utimawa said. "We have one or two incidents a week. We find corpses of tropicbirds and boobies. They also get the eggs—they eat them on the spot or take them home."

I asked him why, and he delivered what I consider to be the epitaph for many endangered species: "Because they taste good."

A red-tailed tropicbird was plump enough to feed two people. Its decorous tail was also prized by the islanders. And it breeds only once a year.

Some islanders were caught and fined $200 for poaching, but the illegal killing was still said to be brisk. It was a hungry island. A can of corned beef or Spam was expensive. Never mind that world-class sashimi and the choicest cuts of tuna were readily available to any of the fishermen. Boobies were tastier. "All you do is put a red rag on a stick," an islander told me. "Boobies are attracted to the color. You wave the stick, and when the booby swoops down, you whack it."

Ambo said, "When we first arrived on the island, we ate the birds all the time. I like the
tei-tei
— frigate bird. It's very easy to catch. Offer it fish with your left hand, and when it comes down to take it, you grab the bird's neck with your right hand and twist it."

Many terns nested on the ground. Their eggs were snatched. Tropic-bird chicks huddling in the brush under the salt scrub were just plucked, their necks wrung.

"I like crabs," a man named Tabai said. "No—don't need a trap. Just pick them up with your hand."

That was the trouble with the Peaceable Kingdom. All these serene creatures were there for the picking. The island was full of sitting ducks.

I asked Ambo, "Why does the government stop you from eating the birds?"

He said, "Because people come from overseas and want to see the birds.
I-matang
like birds."

This word was interesting.
I-matang
was generally used to mean "foreigner" (there are four such people on Christmas Island), but etymologically it was "the person from Matang." In his celebrated book about the old days in the Gilberts,
A Pattern of Islands,
Arthur Grimble explained that Matang was the ancestral home of the I-Kiribati, the original fatherland, a place of fair-skinned people, so the word implied kinship. And by the way, it is an actual place, Madang, on the northern coast of New Guinea, conjectured by historians to be the origin of these Micronesian people.

Terns strafed my camp; boobies followed me when I was paddling—sometimes large numbers of them, thirty or forty big brown birds, often shadowed by the larger frigate birds, which seemed, in spite of their thieving ways, angelic guardians. The sky was always filled with birds; and ghost crabs scuttled and crunched across the smithereens of infertile whitish-gray coral that passed for earth; and large fish were constantly thrashing the shallow lagoon—I could see them: bonefish, milkfish, yard-long blacktip sharks, moving like torpedoes.

I could not remember ever having camped in a place so blindingly bright, where there was so little shade. In the heat of the day I crouched under my flapping tent fly and read Céline —
Journey to the End of the Night,
in which the main character, Bardamu, in Africa speaks of a man with "ten thousand kilos of sunshine on his head," or again, "If you don't want the sun to burn your brains through your eyes, you have to blink like a rat."

Those descriptions resonated at the back of Christmas Island's lagoon, where it was dark at 6:20, and then everything went black: too ambitious a walk or a paddle meant my having to grope back to camp in moon shadow. For four days I saw no other people, and would have stayed longer in the bush but for running low on drinking water. Even so, an old-timer told me that I was only the second person who had ever gone camping on the island.

When I had first arrived I had looked at London—the small sleepy beat-up town, the cheery people in its cheerless shops selling identical canned goods, its littered main street, its defunct businesses, like the Atoll Seaweed Company, a victim of El Niño. The island had so few motor vehicles that mongrels slept contentedly in the middle of the street, and only the foraging piglets were active. In one of the tiny shops, a young girl in a T-shirt leaned on a counter, murmuring as she read a foreign magazine she had borrowed from the library: "
One of the very nicest treats arising from an English summer is to be able to have afternoon tea in the garden. It is even more delightful because of the infrequency of exactly the right weather ... elderly retainers tottering under the weight of silver trays groaning with plates of thinly-cut cucumber sandwiches, tall silver teapots and the best china. Superior cakes, madeleines, sandcakes, meringues and sachertorte
" — at which point she said to me (I was buying beer), "Mister, what is this word?"

After that, from the shore, where junked trucks sat rusting, I could see the two surf breaks—one just off London, the other near Cook Island, where in season there were great rideable waves and surfers on them. London was obviously hard up, but it had a blessed serenity and a palpable sense of peace.

That changed overnight. I returned to London on the day a cruise ship, the
Crown Princess,
fresh from Maui, was anchored offshore. Boat day! The whole somnolent place had come alive, though the cruise passengers, many hundreds of them, squinted in skepticism at the low tin-roofed buildings of the improvised town and tried to avoid stepping on the torn-open corned beef cans. But the most surprising thing was that the children I had seen a week earlier, frolicking in the schoolyard or at Father Bermond's church hall, were now circulating among the cruise passengers, begging like lepers. "Give me money!" And the little girls were no longer in school uniforms but were dressed in tremulous grass skirts and seductive makeup, with shell necklaces and flowers plaited in their hair. They sidled up to the visitors and winked and had their pictures taken—Christmas Island coquettes—and they asked for money too.

Islanders hawked shell bowls and shell necklaces, palm leaf hats and shark jaws, postcards, sea urchin and giant clam shells. The post office in town had closed for the day and become another stall at the boat dock, where Kiribati stamps depicting birds and butterflies were being sold for twice their value. Bulky islanders danced the explosive Wantarawa, the comic travesty of what was originally a war dance. A semicircle of hunkered-down men were harmonizing. Each group of performers brandished a plastic bucket, soliciting donations.

"There was no begging before the cruise ships," Kim Andersen told me. He is the island's only American, and runs a well-equipped diving and offshore-fishing outfit, Dive Kiribati. Having operated similar businesses off the Turks and Caicos, as well as in Panama and Mexico, Kim said that diving off Christmas Island is world class.

The island's pioneer European, a Kiribati-speaking Scotsman named John Bryden, said, "The cruise ship visits are important to the island. They definitely inject money into the economy and they get people busy."

Few of the visiting passengers got farther than the edge of town. I heard one woman say to her companion, "I don't think there's much on the island to see."

Their hour on shore was up. They headed back to the ship. You couldn't blame them. But it was a pity, for even in the half day they had, they could have gone fifteen miles or so past the town line, where habitation ends and the richness of the island begins. The wild birds, the lagoon fringe, the million coconut palms, the great windy emptiness, the storm-free weather and silky air—here was the serene epitome of nature, so safe and unthreatening that birds such as the golden plover and ruddy turnstone flew thousands of miles from Alaska to winter here. This place was so perfect in its way, a place that had hardly known humans—it was even spared the Pacific war—that British and American scientists, and ambitious soldiers, were encouraged to come here and deliver the ultimate Christmas present by exploding thirty-four nuclear bombs.

It says something for the tenacity of nature that even after this massive insult, the island's larger, unpeopled portion is still thriving in its eccentric way.

T
HERE IS A CRACK
in the earth which extends from the Sea of Galilee to the coast of Mozambique, and I am living on the edge of it, in Nyasaland." I was writing in blue ink on a sheet of school foolscap, in my little house in the bush near Soche Hill. It thrilled me to be so far from home, and to be able to make a statement like that. It was the hot season, known locally as the Suicide Month, because of the suffocating and depressing heat. But that was a settler expression, and most of the white settlers had bolted from the country when the Africans took power.

"The crack is the Great Rift Valley," I went on. "It seems to be swallowing most of East Africa. In Nyasaland it is replacing the fishing villages, the flowers, and the anthills with a nearly bottomless lake, and it shows itself in rough escarpments and troughs up and down this huge continent. It is thought that this valley was torn amid great volcanic activity. The period of volcanism has not ended in Africa. It shows not only in the Great Rift Valley itself, but in the people, burning, the lava of the masses, the turbulence of the humans themselves who live in the Great Rift."

I went on writing, describing my school, my students, the villages nearby. It was a letter from a distant place where I felt I had arrived, and I knew I was happy. When I published this "Letter from Africa" in an American newspaper, I had a distinct sense that I had fully embarked on a writing career.

At the age of twenty-two, hoping to avoid being drafted into the U.S. Army, but also wishing to see the world, I joined the Peace Corps. When I went to Malawi in 1963 it was called the Nyasaland Protectorate and was administered by Britain. In rural areas, women and children dropped to their knees, out of respect, when a white person went by in a Land Rover. African men merely bowed. The country became independent in July 1964, and four months later there was an attempted coup d'etat—sackings, shootings, resignations. People were arrested for repeating rumors, charged with "creating alarm and despondency"—how I loved that expression. The president-for-life, Dr. Hastings Banda, had spent much of his working life in Britain and did not speak any African language well enough to give speeches in anything but English. He wore three-piece pinstriped suits and a Homburg and had an interpreter for talking to his people. It was, for some months anyway, very cold in the country. Many Africans I met were pious members of the Church of Scotland, but they also believed in ghosts and witches. There were stubborn mustached English settlers who said they would never leave Africa. There were nuns, lepers, guerrillas, and runaways. Malawi had a once-a-week newspaper and a terrible railwaystation and steam locomotives. It was a land of constant rumors. In the deep south of the country, the Africans often went naked; in the north they wore English flannels. This was not the Africa I had expected. I think my contemplating its oddness from my isolation at the edge of the Great Rift helped make me a writer.